It was Saturday, September 3rd, and the place was packed. I took a look at the crowd and was glad we’d called our order in. 5A’s is always busy, but every table isn’t always full. I made my way to the counter, looked into the kitchen and noted that there wasn’t a single woman there, only guys. Sayeed, two of his sons, an old man, who is probably ten years younger than me, which I have a nodding acquaintance with, and another man I’d not seen before were all working. That’s enough personnel to get the job done, but not as smoothly as it would have been accomplished with the presence of a woman.

“Where’s Sasha?” I asked Saeed, when he worked his way to the counter.

“She had something to do in Atlanta,” he said as he glanced around the jammed dining room and then threw a look over his shoulder to make sure his all-male crew was moving in something like a coordinated effort.

“What’s going on in Atlanta that could be more fun than this?”

He grinned, shrugged, and threw his arms out, open palms up, and said, “I don’t know. She said it was important and she had to be there.”

Same time next day, I walked into 5A’s and though the crowd was different, its size was about the same. At the counter, I noted the crew, with a couple of substitutions, was was still all male. Saeed seemed calmer, and he had a smile on his face as he raised his phone toward me and said, “Here’s what our warrior is doing.”

I looked at the photo displayed on the screen of his phone and asked, “That’s Sasha?”

“Yep,” he said with pride, as if he were the one who dispatched her to a far away corner of the universe. “That’s Sasha the Warrior and not just any Warrior. She has been officially recognized as The Best Warrior.”

“I’ve always known she was good, great actually,” I said. “I just wasn’t aware of her true position in the overall scheme of things.”

He rolled his and eyes and without words he made it clear that he had always known Sasha was a warrior.

Sasha’s important mission was to participate in the 2016 Dragon Con Convention. If, like me, you’ve never heard of of Dragon Con, here’s Wikipedia’s opening two sentences on the subject: “Dragon Con is a North America multi-genre convention, founded in 1987, which takes place once each year in Atlanta, Georgia. As of 2016, the convention draws attendance of over 77,000, features hundreds of guests, encompasses five hotels in the Peachtree Center neighborhood of downtown Atlanta near Centennial Olympic Park, and runs thousands of hours of programming for fans of science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and other elements of fan culture.”

To complete your Dragon Con education, here’s a short clip posted on YouTube that will give you an idea of the seriousness of the event and the devotion and intensity of its participants:

The moment I saw the photo of Sasha the Warrior, I knew I wanted to post it in a blog though I didn’t know how to fit it into the untroubled mind theme. Then, as I read about Dragon Con and watched a number of the videos that I had to watch to learn enough to write this, it came to me. Actually, a couple of things came to me. The first was the first chapter of the Dhammapada, which begins:

We are what we think.All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.

The second thing I thought of as I considered Dragon Con, was a passage from The Divine Moment that goes like this:

And what of this moment?Does it carry meaning?

All of the meaningyou care to invest.That’s your act:to give meaning.

Try not to suffera failure of imagination.Do your very best…

The universe awaitsyour unique contributionplant a new seed in thematrix of life.

“With our thoughts we make the world,” and Dragon Con is living proof they are limited only by our willingness to breath life into them. And meaning? Pama Rab Sel said it better than I ever could; “All the meaning you care to invest. That’s your act: to give meaning.”

So how does that fit into the concept of an untroubled mine? The answer to that question is on the faces of the Dragon Con participants and spectators shown in the video.

Jill and Liz took a small table up against a wall in one of the darker corners of the Deco Café. They often ate there Saturday night when, once again, they found themselves dateless and bored. They enjoyed one another’s company, but on a preference scale, friendship, though high, certainly wasn’t at the top. They had graduated from college together, Jill in science and Liz in Fine Arts. Jill had started as a lab tech at a biochemical company, but couldn’t go much further without another degree. Liz kept on as a song writer and vocal backup for a small local group but paid her rent working retail sales in the mall.

Their lives had been in this same rut for seven years now, and both were becoming gloomy about their futures.

“Anything exciting this week?” Jill regularly started their conversation with that question. They used to laugh at it, but not any longer.

Liz was already on her second glass of wine and their entrees hadn’t even arrived. She sighed loudly. “Did you ever imagine it would be like this?”

“Like this, how?” Jill asked.

“Like when you look out there in front of you and you can’t see one little glimmer of hope.”

“Hope for what?”

“Don’t be a nerd,” Jill, “you’re not exactly enamored with life right now, you with seven years as a lab tech with geeky guys and a grumpy PhD as a boss.”

“And your life is so fulfilling?” Jill’s voice had a slight edge to it. That was exactly how she too would have described her situation, but it sounded so much worse when someone else said it. It actually frightened her. She didn’t want to talk about it or hear about it from Liz.

Rather than get involved with Jill’s question, Liz picked up her phone from the table and began scanning email. A message there had her pop over to facebook to read about their next best friend getting divorced. The gal had lost her job a month ago, and her husband caught her in bed with his best friend when he thought she was out looking for a job. Liz held up the phone so Jill could read it, then commented, “Well, least we’re not dealing with that.”

Jill dug into her purse and hauled out her phone. She pulled up twitter to see who new might be following her. Two weeks ago, an interesting guy had left her 140 characters of pleasantries, and she kept hoping he’d get back.

The waitress came up to their table and saw what she had grown accustomed to seeing these days—two people sitting at a table staring at their cell phones. She placed each plate in the space available under their phones and left. She didn’t know how long it might be before they acknowledged her, and she was too busy to find out. Finally, Jill and Liz set their phones aside and looked at the comfort food they’d ordered, thinking first of all the calories and then dropping the thought with a flash of resentment. This, or a close facsimile, was what their lives had become.

…..

How close does this scene match up with your life—not the specifics but the mood, the sentiment? How much of your life do you live from a sense of hollowness, asking questions like: why is my life so empty or what am I missing here?

The answer is the same to both those questions and many others like them. It lies in the realm of engagement and the fact that few people ever truly engage with life. Instead, we look for ways to occupy our minds, to distract ourselves from our emptiness, our fear or our depressive thoughts about the future.

But here’s the tricky part. Just because we sign-up for the art classes, just because we sit in an arena and ride a horse in a circle, just because we take yoga or study as a student, or just because we go to the gym three days a week, in no way implies we are engaged with life and living. What these amount to for most of us are just ways to put a dent in our boredom or chase a dream. They are not examples of being engaged with life.

Why not, you might be asking now? A good question. True engagement occurs within a certain state of consciousness that requires us to approach the world with more than mere participation as our incentive. It demands of us that we become clear and truthful about what we are about to do. The five questions below are the sort that will create the level of clarity that engagement requires.

What will I bring to the experience?

What is my level of intention?

What do I want to learn or explore that matters such that I couldn’t put it aside?

What questions do I yearn to have answered?

How much am I willing to risk to accomplish this?

One question is no less important than another. They must all matter to someone who wants to engage with life.

So how would we recognize this state of consciousness? Consider what it feels like when you are watching a great moment in sports where a participant is giving everything he or she can to create an intended outcome. Your attention is total, rapt in the awe of what is taking place. Thoughts about yourself are completely absent. You mind is wholly untroubled. There is no inner conversation and no emotions or self-consciousness. What sustains you is a sense of you as a living being and this wondrous event unfolding.

There is no true life without engagement and the selfless fervor, vitality and fulfillment it offers. And yet, there is no possibility of being engaged while under the influence of a troubled mind. The troubled mind is forever conversing, telling you tales of wonder and horror, making you think your real life is what’s going on in your head. The untroubled mind is impersonal, empty, still and serene; open to the world and its marvels. It is that state of consciousness that was meant to be ours. Is it no wonder we sense we’re missing something of great value?

Mary Oliver, a poet of immense talent and intent, is forthright about where a life of non-engagement will take us. In her poem, “When Death Comes,” she makes it clear to herself what she’ll allow in her life and what she won’t. She says to us all:

Yesterday, during a random entertainment search on Amazon Video, I saw a Billy Bob Thornton movie we’d missed. That wasn’t a surprise, since we don’t spend a lot of time watching entertainment news – none actually, but that has nothing to do with this post. The 2012 movie is called Jayne Mansfield’s Car. Billy Bob wrote, directed and starred in it. After watching it, I have put it in my private category, “the problem with sharing truth.”

I don’t think this is a spoiler, but you might. So, if you haven’t seen the movie but might, you should consider closing the post right here. Since you’re reading this, I have to assume you want to hear the rest of the story. Here it is. That’s Billy Bob Thornton on the left. He plays Skip. In the center is Robert Patrick. He plays Jimbo. That’s Keven Bacon on the right. He’s Carroll. Underlying all the segments of the story is the involvement, or uninvolvement of all the male characters in their respective wars. For Skip, Jimbo and Carroll, that was World War II. Skip and Carroll are combat veterans and Jimbo, who served in the laundry at Fort Polk, Louisiana, wasn’t.

Knowing that Jimbo is troubled by his non-participation, Skip decides it’s time to put his brother’s mind at ease on the subject. The three men are talking, which in itself is a rare event, when Skip says, “Look Jimbo, me and Carroll want you to know that we don’t care that you aren’t a combat veteran.” The short conversation when straight downhill from there and came to an abrupt halt when Jimbo threw a right hook that caught Skip in the jaw and sent him sprawling. Jimbo then stormed off and Carroll helped Skip to his feet while saying, “What in the hell did you do that for? He was talking to us. Couldn’t you just listen for once?”

As I watched, I thought of times I have felt a need to share that kind of truth with someone and basically got the same reaction, maybe not a fist to the face, but a response delivered with the same intention. Humans seem to have a built in desire to focus a lot of energy on helping others, often beginning their efforts with this explanation, “I just want you to know I think… or believe…” I’ve discovered over the course of the past seventy years that I am on safer ground to begin my missionary statement with, “I just found out that your mother was a prostitute…” or “I didn’t know your daddy was a drunk.”

The fact of the matter is, I’d never criticize anyone’s parents, and, after some memorably bad experiences, I learned not to begin any conversation with, “I just want you to know…” There’s a reason for that, and it has nothing to do with the universally bad response I’ve gotten from that opening. The reason – I’ve reached the point where I know that anyone who wants to know what I think or believe, already knows. Anyone who doesn’t know, doesn’t care and won’t be swayed by what I know, think, or believe. At the bottom of that hard won knowledge is that knowing that my only job is to work on myself. Or, to use words that better express it; my number one job is practice all of the truth I know, every minute of every day. When I do that it fills every moment, leaving no time for me to do anything else.

The original title for this post was, “If it’s the last thing I ever do.” There was no post when I put that title on the line a couple of weeks ago. There was just an idea of what I wanted to talk about but, at the very best, it was just a vague idea. To be totally accurate, “If it’s the last thing I ever do,” came to me when I was cutting the grass and thinking, not about cutting the grass but about an abrupt, and unexpected death in my family. So, with no more than a vague idea of what I wanted to say and no clear way to say it, I parked the post, which was only a title, and there it has waited, until now.

I knew this morning I wanted to write a post and center it around a story I heard night before last as I watched the Giants lose game two of a three game series to the Pirates. Mike Krukow, one of the Giants’ commentators, whom I mentioned in What do you see? , told yet another Will Clark story. Once again I knew it was a zen story told by a zen master about a zen master – and of course I knew I had to share it.

I opened the dashboard of www.untroubledmind.com and clicked “new post.” Before the new blank page could open, I saw the draft for “If It’s the Last Thing I Ever Do,” and I realized the two tied together. Let me tell you the story. I’m sure you’ll make the tie in.

In his first regular major league baseball game, August 8, 1986, Will hit a home run off of Nolan Ryan, legendary fast ball pitcher and now a member of baseball’s Hall of Fame. But that wasn’t Krukow’s story. He told the story of Will’s very first major league game, a training camp game, played a month before his memorable appearance against Nolan Ryan. Clark, at first base, watched as his pitcher walked the first batter he faced, hit the next batter, and loaded the bases when he walked the third man in the batting order. Before he could throw another pitch, Clark, a total rookie, screamed, “Time out! Time out! TIME OUT!!” and ran to the mound. The pitcher and, I’m sure everyone else playing, managing, and watching the game, was shocked. Rookies don’t call time out. He was further shocked when Will said, “If we’re going to win this game, you’ve got to do a whole lot better than that,” turned and ran back to first base.

I thought about that story again yesterday after watching the Giants lose the third and final game against the Pirates, and I thought, they need another Will Clark on the team, someone who really wants to win. Someone who will call time out and say, “If we’re going to win this game, we have to play a whole lot better than this.”

And then I thought, we all need to be like Will Clark when we aren’t living the very best we know how to live. We need to call time out and remind ourselves that we can play a whole lot better than we are playing. And when I thought about that, another thought came exploding into my head – my almost forgotten blog title – “What If It’s the Last Thing I Ever Do.”

This day, this game, this inning, this pitch… this very pitch, could be the last thing you or I ever do. It’s too late to question the act itself. It is what we are doing.

We have to forget about why we’re doing it, and the countless things that led us here and ask right now, in this moment, IS THIS THE BEST I CAN DO?

Don’t take the subject of this post personally. Understand, not only will you never be enlightened, neither will anyone else. In fact, there are no enlightened individuals, nor have there ever been any enlightened individuals, simply because there are no individuals.

The thing that you call “yourself” doesn’t exist. Our selves, the primary object of our focus, doesn’t exist. Medical examiners who dissect humans and meticulously record their actions have never reported finding a “self.”

There seems to be an infinite number of official causes of death: gunshot to the head, massive chest trauma, heart attack, etc. etc., but never a deformed, weak, or defective self. That should be cause for some wonder, because it is this “self” that is responsible for all deaths, natural or unnatural.

However, we never seem to wonder about that. In the most deplorably violent deaths, like the the recent mass murders, we speak of the cause being someone’s mental condition or disturbed mind. What if all except natural deaths were determined to be caused by a disturbed mind? Would we take a look at this thing we call our self from a different perspective?

If history is any indicator, the answer is no we would not for a moment consider the possibility that our so-called self is responsible, not only for our death, but also for every other less-than-joyous event in our life.

There are those who have seen through the illusion of the self. Wei Wu Wei, for example, in his book, Ask the Awakened, wrote:

Why are you unhappy?Because 99.9 percentOf everything you think,And of everything you do,Is for yourself –And there isn’t one.

That’s why an enlightened individual is a contradiction. Enlightenment is the act of understanding or knowing the Oneness of all things. Jesus speaking to the Oneness of all things, said, “The Father and I are one.” The only way we can know that is to release the illusion that we have somehow separated from the one source of life and become an individual entity. That is not easy task. We’ve built this illusion of individuality over our entire lifetime. To discover it is an illusion is a shock. And, the discovery alone doesn’t dissipate it. That’s just the first step.

The next, and final step toward enlightenment, is to turn the illusion loose. That isn’t easy, to say the least. Especially for those of us who were raised in the “advanced” cultures of the western world where our individuality has been reconfirmed so many times there is little room in our consciousness to question it. However, if we are committed to “breaking out,” it can be done.

We’ll know it’s done when we have no more desires. The Buddha put it most eloquently when he said:

At the end of the way
The master finds freedom
from desire and sorrow –
Freedom without bounds.

Those who awaken
Never rest in one place.
Like swans they rise
And leave the lake.

On the air they rise
And fly an invisible course,
Gathering nothing, storing nothing.
Their food is knowledge.
They live upon emptiness.
They have seen how to break free.

The master surrenders his beliefs.
He sees beyond the end and the beginning.

He cuts all ties.
He gives up all his desires.
He resists all temptations.
And he rises.

And wherever he lives,
In the city or the country,
In the valley or in the hills,
There is great joy.

Even in the empty forest
He finds joy
Because he wants nothing.

Here’s the irony. On the day a master sees through the illusion of self, there will be no visible change to mark his shift, no voice from heaven, not even a shift in the brightness of the day, because, despite its rarity, enlightened is our natural state.

Enlightenment is here and now present. Our attachment to self is the only thing that keeps us from knowing it.

Our self is the cause of all of our sorrow, fear, anger, stress and frustration.

Surely that makes the practice of mindfulness a priceless undertaking.

Watch for our three part post addressing Ego, Meditation, and Connection.

I’m a baseball nut but even before I became one, I was a story nut. I love a good story and I always have. The two most important phrases of my childhood were, “Let me tell you a story,” followed by, “Once upon a time.”

Calendar-wise the clock ran out on my childhood almost seventy years ago. However, when that bell rang, I didn’t hear it. I must have been absorbed in a story someone was telling. I’ve since determined that if you don’t hear the last bell of childhood then it continues indefinitely. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a good thing.

In any case, I heard a great story yesterday, a mindfulness story told by zen master, Mike Krukow, who is also a sports commentator with the San Francisco Giants. The story was about Joe Panik, the Giants 25 year old second baseman (on the left) and Will Clark (on the right), when he was a former Giant first baseman fifteen years ago, who’s now 52. June 18th Joe was struck in the head by a pitched ball in in a game against Tampa Bay. Over the next few days, he was checked a number of times for concussion-like symptoms and was finally placed on the disabled list June 28th. A month later, he returned to the team. His fielding skills had not suffered during his absence but his batting had, and his concern about that wasn’t making things better.

In last weekend’s series with the Baltimore Orioles, he had a recovery that seemed miraculous. Mike Krukow’s partner mentioned it after Joe hit his second double of the series. Mike’s response was, “Let me tell you a story about that.” Of course that got my attention, and now I’m going to tell you what Mike said. Will Clark works for the Giants and was in town over the weekend to attend the events honoring Gaylord Perry, a former Giants pitcher and member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. At some point, early in the weekend, Joe had a chance to talk to Will, once a world class hitter.

Joe told Will about his hitting problem and ended with, “I just don’t see the spin on the ball.”

To understand the significance of his statement you should know that by seeing the spin on a pitch, a hitter can detect what type of pitch it is – fastball, curve, sinker, etc. – and have a better chance to hit it than he would otherwise have. Not being able to detect the spin of a pitch was, to Joe, the reason for his poor hitting performance since returning to the lineup. I’m sure he thought Will was going to give some advice on ways to detect spin but that isn’t what the veteran shared with the kid. He said, “What do you see Joe? That’s what you need to focus on.”

Krukow didn’t furnish any other details of the conversation, but I suspect Joe said something like, ‘I see the release point and the arm speed,’ or some other equally important parts of a pitcher’s delivery. Exactly what Joe said isn’t important. What matters is, he heard Will’s advice – FOCUS ON WHAT YOU SEE.

Focusing on what you see, is the beginning of mindfulness which ultimately leads to being fully aware, in the moment. Focusing on what you see is the threshold of an untroubled mind.

There are two words that appear in all the great teachings – lost and found. We use them like we know what they mean, like we are sure when we are one or the other. But it may not be as obvious as it seems.

Vernon Howard, a man dedicated to helping people see into their lives more clearly, shared a story at the start of his seminal work, The Esoteric Path to a New Life. The story relates how a tourist in a national park was approached by a park ranger. The ranger said, “Go back three miles and turn right at the cabin.”

“I’m sorry,” apologized the tourist, “but I don’t understand what you are talking about.”

The ranger nodded and explained, “I’m talking about the way out.”

Only then did the tourist realize that he was lost.

Silly story? Well, I thought so when I first read it. How could you not know when you are lost?

I had to learn the hard way how that could indeed be true. It was 25 years back now. I spent the summer camping across some of the western states staying primarily in National Forests. One night, just after having cooked an early supper in the Cascades in Washington, my big bouvier, Tigger, and I decided to take a quick hike to the top of the mountain. Actually, he didn’t care where we were going. He just loved to go.

The trails in that park were not well marked, so I was watching closely so as not to get lost. The trip up went well, and as we stepped out of the forest onto the peak my attention was immediately diverted by the view. It was so captivating. Being June, large patches of snow still covered the area with scree in between, while far below us was the wilderness of 4 different states. Tig, a cold weather dog, ran immediately to the closest pile of snow, flipped on his back and rolled in it before tearing around the area with me following. Neither of us realized we were lost.

We roamed around for about an hour, and then I said to the big dog, “I think we better get going. The sun’s dropping fast.” I turned north to head toward the trailhead, only it wasn’t there. All I saw was a wall of wilderness. I looked at the sun and realized how fast the light was fading since we were on the east side of the mountain. A flash of panic hit me, and I saw how the first instinct is to get down the mountain any way you can. That’s how people get lost forever, I thought. There was nothing but wilderness below and no one even knew we were in the area. The temperature began to drop heading below freezing. And still the trailhead was nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t believe it. How could you lose a trailhead, the obvious opening into the forest? I tried back tracking through the snow patches, but Tig, in his joie de vivre had mashed everything together. I went up and down the east side where we’d entered and walked in a rigorous pattern of tracking yet remained dumbfounded as to where the trailhead went. It was as if I was trapped on the top of the mountain.

Finally, I realized I better make provisions for a night up there. I went to a lower edge where we could get over the side without a sheer drop, and I planned where to put together a wiki-up to keep us warm. As I glanced up the side of the mountain from this new vantage point, I saw a narrow little path that ran behind a thin wall of trees and the rest of the forest. Unlike most trailheads that have you step right out into an open area, this one was sheathed in trees, much like a screen wall people put in front of a privy to create privacy. In my original excitement at the view, I never noticed how the trailhead was hidden. I was so relieved, but the next decision was could I get down before it was too dark.

By now it was almost too late to start building a shelter, so I shouted to the dog, let’s get. Tiggy, who had experienced a level of intention in me he’d never before felt, was acting like the best trained dog in the world, and he stayed right with me all the way down. That night we slept happily back in camp.

It is so easy to be lost and not realize it. The condition of being lost as a human being is particularly challenging, for our on-going condition of being lost has nothing to do with geography, but rather an interior confusion created by a mind full of thoughts. When the sages of old told people they were lost, they were referring to the way our minds work, occluding from us our true nature as human beings. “How can that be?” you may be asking. Just as I asked, “How could I not see a trailhead I’d just walked out of?”

The Buddha answers that question so clearly:

We are what we think.All that we are arises with our thoughts.With our thoughts, we make the world.

Thus the world and we, as we commonly think of ourselves, represent a reality we have created with the way we’ve been taught to think. It isn’t the only reality. It isn’t even necessarily factual. But we think it is real, and thus we have little sense of being lost.

The Buddha went on to provide an example of how this happens:

“Look at how he beat me. How he threw me down and robbed me.”Live in such thoughts and you live in hate.“Look at how he beat me. How he threw me down and robbed me.”Abandon such thoughts and live in love.

If you sense you are lost, the only thing left to do is to explore the nature of your thoughts. Not the world around you. Not the circumstances that you appear to be in, but your thoughts. For it is your thoughts that got you lost, and abandoning those thoughts will get you found.

Twenty percent of the sites on the web use WordPress. Though the years I’ve built three or four sites using WordPress, and I know that it is an amazing platform, with more bells and whistles than I’ll ever ring. I also know that it has a learning curve that, from my point of view, takes an inordinate amount of time to learn, or at least to master. Finally, a couple of years ago, I retired from the learning curve and began blogging on Google Blogger (also known as BlogSpot). Blogger is easy to learn and to use, and it has served me well.

Last month, we got the notion to start a new site. Not a general, blog based site, but a specific site dedicated to the practice of mindfulness. We came up with a list of possible names and were delighted to find that our first choice, Untroubledmind.com was available. We quickly purchased the domain and then took a look at our next decision: Blogger or WordPress. We didn’t consider that too long because we knew from experience it had to be WordPress. Since we had used BlueHost before, they were our choice to host the site.

Within minutes we had the site up and running. Then we began looking at premium themes expecting that process to take a while because of the number that are available. However, as soon as we saw the Coastal theme designed by Station Seven, the search was over. With the theme installed and the naive notion that I could maintain the site, we began adding content. First we put up our Contact Us page, and then our Why Mindfulness page, followed quickly by a blog post or two.

We stood back and admired our work and like God, in the book of Genesis, we saw that it was good. Unlike God, we felt a surge of pride and a growing confidence that we had finally mastered WordPress. And then, you guessed it, things went from rosy to dark in one errant keystroke. The results of keystroke was my cursor would no longer travel the full width of the editing screen. I could still write and post blogs but I couldn’t get my mind off the fact that my work space wasn’t right. Of course my monkey mind would not leave that fact alone. I’d type a line and try a fix the problem, type another line and try another fix. That went on for two days. I tried working in Chrome and then Firefox. I changed themes, not once but three times, I looked at line on line of code (which for me was worse than looking for a needle in ten thousand haystacks). I asked myself, ‘what will you do if you find something that doesn’t look right?’ I knew the answer to that question all too well. I’d change it, and then I’d have another problem.

Out of things to do, I began to do the same things over and over. If that sounds like the old definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over and thinking each time that it will turn out different) it was. Finally, in a brief moment of enlightenment, I asked myself what a calm, mindful person, the possessor of an untroubled mind would do. That’s when the light went on, and I began Googling for a solution. Quickly I discovered that my WordPress knowledge wasn’t sufficient even to ask Google the right question. Then I asked myself, What am I looking for?” And I knew. I wanted someone to fix the immediate problem, tune the site and keep it in good working order.

I Googled “repair my WordPress.” Heavenly music didn’t blast out of my computer, but it should have. Now I’ve partnered with WP Curve, a San Francisco based team of WordPress specialists who had Untroubledmind.com back in an untroubled state within hours. But that isn’t all. They gave me a full report on the condition of the site. That report included recommendations and the simple statement, “submit one job at a time, and we’ll fix them in a day or less.” That was two days ago, and now the crew of WP Curve is working on my fifth job – the only concern I now have is is whether or not I can keep them busy.

From the beginning of Untroubledmind, it has been our intention to focus on one topic, mindfulness, or to use blogging terminology, to publish relevant content regarding mindfulness. So how does our agreement with WP Curve fit into that objective? From the moment I found their site and read and watched their customers’ rave reviews, I knew they shared our commitment to operate in the moment.

Here’s and example.

Living in the moment is the way we were meant to travel this path. Prove it for yourself.

Bert and Christina Carson

If you would like to know more about WP Curve – check them out at www.wpcurve.com